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The “Plex Dance”, I thought it’s 2019 already?

Posted by, hxdai on September 8, 2019

After experimenting with multiple ways of setting up my home media server/NAS/data-scraper-to-be/another box wasting electricicty, I finally stumbled upon “The Perfect Media Server” from linuxserver.io. I don’t know how I missed it last many times since it’s been around since 2016, but finally MergerFS + SnapRAID has shined their lights upon me. Also, I finally come into modern times and started actually using docker. (Rockstor does use it, but not me directly), and first thing I install is, obviously, plex.

So I put in some MP3s, fire up plex, and they show up. Artists and track names and pictures and all. Simple. Or you’d think. They showed up [Unknown Artist] and such. Bummer. Just update their tags and have Plex rescan it and all will be fine, right? RIGHT?

Apparently not. Enter the “Plex Dance”, something even their forum mods recognizes and recommends. So plex ignores the obvious file content change due to metadata, and instead rely on its own metadata to say, “doesn’t look like there’s change to me”. The solution? move the files to force plex to update its own metadata, then move them back to force plex to (again) update its own metadata, at which time it will read the tags.

I mean, tag updates cause file to change, that alone should be enough to trigger a rescan, no? It shouldn’t take the entire file to disappear before plex panics and update metadata…this is 2019 already, if you really are scanning library location periodically, you’d think they know enough about the file changes and update accordingly.